The European Parliament hearings on the Commission's proposal for a "Regulation establishing rules on the access of third countries' goods and services to the EU internal market in public procurement" offers an opportunity to review two key pillars of the proposal. First, the Directive...

Given the unsatisfactory deployment of fibre based Next Generation Access (NGAs) networks in the EU, the European Commission proposes in a draft recommendation from December 2012 that wholesale prices for access to the copper networks should be between €8-10. This means that the former...

Despite major advancements in the Japan-EU FTA (JEUFTA) negotiations, the talks remain difficult in the railway sector. These difficulties flow largely from the fact that the Japanese railways are organized on a radically different legal and economic basis than the railway systems in the EU....

This policy brief outlines the chronology of the developments since Edward Snowden leaked the documents on large-scale electronic surveillance, including PRISM and Tempora programmes, the policy implications and the public's response. It concludes that the nature of the debate has shifted from a...

Following an FTA with Korea, the EU now takes up the ambitious task of negotiating an FTA with Japan. Inarguably, "big" FTAs are the way forward in the search for growth, but in parallel, the EU should aim to diversify its regional outreach to rebalance trade accounts. In this sense, Taiwan has...